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A new Amex Offer popped up a couple of days ago for 10,000 Membership Rewards points back on a $500+ prepaid hotel booking through Amex Travel.
The Deal
- Spend $500+ on a prepaid hotel booking at amextravel.com, get 10,000 Membership Rewards points back
Key Terms
- Only valid on prepaid hotel bookings at amextravel.com
- Must book by 12/31/17
Quick Thoughts
This offer didn’t stand out to me originally because it requires a prepaid hotel booking. That’s not ideal for a couple of reasons: First, plans sometimes change. Second, prepaid hotel bookings do not usually qualify for points / elite credit / elite benefits / etc. That said, if you’re confident that plans won’t change, the value of the points certainly might outweigh the value of any elite benefits or credit. If you have this offer on an Amex Platinum or Business Platinum card, you should further earn 5x on a prepaid hotel booking through amextravel.com for a total of 12,500 points (10K from the offer and 2500 from paying with the Platinum for 5x). Based on our Reasonable Redemption Values, those points are worth about $227.50 (12.5K points at 1.82 cents per point). That’s enough of a rebate to make this well worth consideration.
Note that in my experience, FHR bookings do not trigger Amex Travel offers — so if you’re looking to double dip, I don’t think this one will work. In our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group, there was also some discussion as to whether this would stack with the MGM offers if used for a prepaid MGM booking. I don’t believe that would work either as the MGM offers likely require a charge at an MGM hotel in order to trigger the offer. That said, using this Amex Travel towards a prepaid MGM booking and then charging meals and entertainment to your room so you could trigger one of the MGM offers might be a good way to take advantage of some great offers to save on a Vegas vacation. But don’t forget to compare rates — I usually find rates through my Mlife account online to be much lower than through other avenues. I haven’t compared them directly with Amex Travel today, but it’s something to keep in mind.
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[…] Get 10,000 points back on a $500 prepaid hotel booking […]
Does pre-paid mean non-refundable? I have a recollection of having used one of these offers two years ago for a Hyatt, where I would have been a Hyatt Diamond, and discovering when I called Hyatt about a suite upgrade that the booking through Amex travel basically killed all my Hyatt karma, including qualifying nights. I decided that the whole thing wasn’t worth it, canceled out with Amex, and had the pre-paid money returned to my credit card.
This said, memory is a strange thing, and I concur with Jay that there are a lot of circumstances that can make this hard to use. Just not sure that non-refundability is among them.
I have several overseas trips booked for next year and I tried hard to find a way to take advantage of this offer but in the end could not because either:
A. The hotel I wanted was not available on the AMEX website.
B. The price was much higher compared to me booking it through CITI Prestige and getting the 4th night free.
I’ll keep trying and hopefully I find something that makes sense.